A Lesson on Cellular Economics

It's Tuesday night. Laura has had a long day, and I'm tired too. Neither of us particularly feels like making anything for supper, so we call Mimmo's. Tuesday night is two-for-one pizza night.

And an hour later we receive a lesson on cellular economics in Africa.

My cell phone rings, but only once. I retrieve it from the office, punch in the code to unlock it, and a message appears to tell me that I have one missed call. An unknown number.

At home, I would have just stopped there. Probably someone dialled the wrong number, realized it, and hung up. But that's not how cellular economics works in Africa.

I suspected that this was the "Mozambican answering machine," so I hit redial. Sure enough, it was the pizza delivery man, lost. Five minutes later, we had our pizza, only slightly cold.

I wrote previously that cell phones are ubiquitous. That only tells half the story. Most people don't actually have any credit on their phones, so it is very common to receive a one-ring phone call. Call me back, please. On your credit.

In Mozambique, outbound calls are charged; inbound ones are not. That simple fact has a profound impact on cell phone usage here. Everyone with a cell phone is an amateur economist.

* * * * *

In Bangladesh, the Grameen Bank's "telephone ladies" made popular a micro-enterprise of what amounted to a roving phone booth: a lady would receive a loan for a cellular phone and make her living by selling airtime to people in the community who didn't have telephone service but needed to make a phone call.

In Mozambique, a similar model is used by South Africa's OneCell. Even in the capital of Maputo, the streets are dotted with OneCell's bright orange umbrellas. Under these umbrellas, entrepreneurs sell phone calls over a cellular network.

These, like the phone booth back home, will soon be extinct.

* * * * *

Everyone has a cell phone, but few have credit. Sounds like prepaid credit is valuable, right? Right.

In fact, it is a convenient way for people to store and transfer wealth. By punching in a particular series of digits, followed by a recipient's phone number, users can transfer credits from one to another.

Imagine wanting to purchase a small bunch of bananas from the sidewalk vendor, but not having any money left. Rather than handing him cash, you can instantly "deposit" some of your wireless credit from your phone to his (that is, if you've conserved your prepaid credits!).

For the vendor, having less cash means that there is less risk of being robbed.

And I hear -- though I haven't seen it yet -- that there are even enterprising individuals who will purchase the street vendors' excess cell phone credit at a modest discount and resell it to people wanting to replenish their phones.

Cell phone credit, it turns out, functions as a second currency in Africa. Without, I would imagine, having to pay taxes to the government. Yet.

The Deafening Echoes of War

Flooding, drought, and cyclones have filled the news over the past three months in Mozambique. The southern capital of Maputo has -- for the most part -- been spared these destructive forces.

Until now.

Laura and I sat at home, writing a few emails to friends and family, when the distant rumble of a strange African thunderstorm started. It must have been far off in the distance, because we couldn't see a cloud in the sky. The storm must be just over the trees.

The thunder claps rolled in with a fury, getting louder and louder. The shockwaves were more intense than I had ever experienced. At several points, I looked outside, believing that a truck had hit our building. We decided to shut our curtains in case the windows shattered. As I was standing in the front window doing so, I noticed one dark cloud off in the distance. Then I noticed that it had a tail trailing down to the ground.

The thunderous booms grew in power.

Neighbours' windows were blown out, but I didn't realize that the experience was much more severe for others in the city until we made some phone calls. The country's largest armoury was on fire again, flinging old soviet projectiles in every direction. For more than four hours, munitions as small as bullets and as large as vehicles were sent flying kilometres away, killing, maiming and destroying houses.

Mario told me that the armoury was in Malhazine, right beside Zimpeto. Suddenly the tragedy was brought a frightening step closer to reality for us: we have a friend in Zimpeto, a Canadian visiting for two weeks, working at an orphanage there (more on that next week).

Our cell phone reception was lost briefly as we tried to make contact. The electricity was spotty, as well. We finally received word back from the orphanage: please pray. Projectiles were flying over their heads. Everyone was huddled together in a small building, volunteers comforting orphans, volunteers comforting volunteers. It was a frightening, albeit accidental, war zone in an otherwise-peaceful country.

A shell tore through the roof of the chapel where they were scheduled to be worshipping but thankfully were not.

Once again, by the grace of God, Laura and I were protected in our cocoon, but had no way of helping our friends as the danger unfolded.

I didn't fully grasp the magnitude of what was happening until the next morning when I drove to Zimpeto to get Julie and bring her to the airport for her scheduled departure. Malhazine is right in between our home and Zimpeto, forcing me to drive by the now-quieted armoury. Crowds were gathered around trying to learn what they could. Holes were punched in large buildings; small, simple houses were flattened. Military personnel were gathering large ordnance from people's yards, placing them on the backs of trucks and parading them down the street to the false safety of their storage facility. Back to where the explosions started.

Only a kilometre before arriving at the orphanage, I passed a psychiatric hospital that had been destroyed.

Once at the orphanage, the first person I encountered was a long-term volunteer whose children Laura teaches at school. She and her husband were visibly shaken, feeling the burden of caring for their own family and the hundreds of scared orphans under their watch. At that point, they still weren't sure where all the children were: frightful of war, Mozambicans' habit is to run aimlessly (recall Olga's frayed nerves last time this happened).

The government is reporting the death toll at 96. That's how many bodies are accounted for in the morgue, but everyone knows more will be found over the coming days. Hundreds of people crowd the hospitals maimed and wounded. The hospitals have run out of blood for transfusions.

I was relieved to hear that there were no injuries at the orphanage, and that Julie was fine, though shaken. We spent the morning at the airport, waiting for the uncertain hour of her departure as the airport's damaged runway was repaired.

By late morning, rumours were circulating that the explosions had resumed. Laura's school was closed early; Julie's orphanage was evacuated.

By early afternoon, the airplane that would take Julie home had arrived from Johannesburg, and the crew seemed more eager than normal to make a quick exit. As Julie boarded, I wondered if their haste was because the plane was so late already, or because of the black smoke visible on the horizon at the end of the runway.

Barely half an hour after landing, the plane had loaded its new passengers, refueled, and was again airborne. It was soon a speck in the sky, distancing itself from the chaos below, safely on its way to Johannesburg.

Don't Blink

Mozambique's flood waters are receding and the news cameras are shifting their focus to other crises elsewhere in the world. Blink.

As the water recedes, the full extent of the damage can be assessed. The government has estimated that cleaning up the mess will cost US$71 million, but that grossly underestimates the extent of the damage. More telling are the personal impact statistics: an estimated 494,000 people impacted, including 38 deaths.

Survival is assured only by the tenuous strength of a thread, as thousands depend upon the acts of selfless front-line volunteers like David Morrison and the countless people whose support allows them to fill their convoys of trucks with maize meal and supplies.

But for many in Mozambique, the real crisis is just beginning.

Over the coming months, hundreds of thousands of people will leave these temporary refugee camps and return to their homes to find little more than piles of mud. Their crops, which would have been harvested this month and stored to feed their families until the next harvest, have been washed away. There will be little to eat in the coming months, not to speak anything of excess to hawk at the market.

Those who do have excess to sell will have difficulty recovering their costs, having to compete against the tons of international food aid that will depress local market prices. The arrival of food is good news for the starving, but bad news for the small-scale merchants trying to make a living. The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), which coordinates food aid in such crises, has said that they will purchase as much food locally as possible, and is asking donor nations for cash to do so.

The WFP's challenge isn't restricted to feeding those families affected by the flooding. In the south of Mozambique, a short but intense heatwave this summer caused nearly three times as many hectares of crops to wilt as washed away in the floods. The heatwave didn't make the international news because, well, watching video footage of a heatwave is like watching video footage of paint drying. It's dull. Raging floodwaters, low-flying helicopters, washed-out bridges and dramatic rescues all help the newscasters to compete against other shows that feed our Hollywood-induced attention deficits.

Despite the action-packed video footage, floods are slow-motion disasters. Judging by the datestamps on the emails that we received, Mozambique was flooding for at least six weeks before it was severe enough to make the news back home.

And its people will be recovering long after the last news crews sign their bylines and file their stories.

Blink.

It's not realistic to think that the news could broadcast every emerging crisis around the world. That's not the point. But featuring these stories creates two opposing problems: first, that viewers assume that when there's not a story on the evening news, that there's not a problem. Far from the truth. Second, they paint these places as dens of permanent disaster, of places they would not like to visit.

Mozambicans that I've talked with are embarrassed that the floods make international headlines. They're embarrassed that the international community will think of Mozambique as a country that hobbles from one crisis to the next.

They want the news to focus on Africa's humanity, not its poverty. They want people to know that many great things happen in Mozambique in all the space between the punctuations of tragedy.

When we turn the channel, they continue to live. When we send our aid cheques to the next country, they continue to live. When our attention shifts, they continue to live.

Don't blink.

Feed My Sheep

Over the past number of weeks, many people have been asking us about the impact of flooding in Mozambique. There has been a small amount of flooding in Maputo. Yesterday, Laura and I noticed a floor of water flowing through dozens of caniço homes in Alzira's neighbourhood.

The major flooding -- the emergency that has been broadcast on the international news -- is occurring primarily around the Zambezi river in central Mozambique, perhaps 500km from our home.

David Morrison is a missionary colleague from Toronto who is based in Malawi, bordering Mozambique to the northwest where this major flooding has been occurring. He has been assisting with the relief effort by bringing trucks of maize meal and the Bread of Life to starving refugees, and shares the following glimpse of his trip into Mozambique's newly-established refugee camps last week:

It is 4 a.m. and we are barely awake as we load the last few relief items into what is already an overloaded Pinzgauer to begin our seven-hour journey back to Mozambique. Our convoy will bring hope and 17.5 metric tons of maize flour to some of the thousands who are suffering in the flood zone in Mutarara district. I’m accompanied by three of our national church leaders: Timothy, Ali and Samson, who are squeezed in among beans, clothing, soap and salt, as well as supplies to sustain us on the journey, like clean water and 100 extra litres of petrol.

The rains this week have made the roads more challenging. We drive slowly and stop to navigate our way through each washout before proceeding. The strength and maneuverability of the Pinzgauer get us through many difficult patches of flooded road. We see field after field of destroyed crops, collapsed houses, and several refugee camps with grass huts close together on isolated pieces of high ground. Our pastors in the back are bashed around as we make deep ruts in the muddy road. Mud shoots down the sides of the truck and splashes up on the windshield. After about 10 kilometres of driving, with heart beating fast, I am soaked in sweat from maneuvering the truck through the challenging conditions.

We are carried by the strength of God, and His grace sees us through the borders and to our first destination -- a refugee camp we visited the previous week. A place of great despair and suffering.

We pull off the road into the camp and are warmly greeted by the village headman and the other leaders. They are grateful that we have kept our promise to return, and look eagerly to see what we have brought. All are gathered and take refuge from the blazing sun under the shade of a large tree. Our church leaders begin singing praises to God.

The community is so welcoming. The people are so hungry. They tell us that already one person has died from hunger.

I start to cry -- the situation before me is too overwhelming. Tears of sadness for the people’s suffering mix with tears of joy knowing that on this day everyone will be filled. I hide behind my camera and start taking pictures.

Moments later the truck in our convoy pulls up… and stops! The people's despair is quickly lifted from their faces. The songs of worship grow more passionate. Hope has arrived!

Until now the camp had been overlooked. For weeks its inhabitants have been hungry, eating grass, roots, bugs and lily bulbs from the crocodile infested flood areas. People are sick with malaria, dysentery, eye infections, skin infections and coughs. I see many babies with puss oozing from their eyes. Children have bloated stomachs and wear rags. Many of the young ones have nothing to wear at all.

I watch the village headman as the truck approaches. His face is filled with disbelief. Can this be true? Is this really happening? Is this food for us? For a moment he looks stunned, but moves quickly to make a plan to ensure that the supplies are distributed fairly.

Over the past weeks these people have stood in this very spot and watched as many trucks similarly loaded with relief supplies drive right past them on route to Mutarara. They have become used to being passed by. I share with them that Jesus knows their pain and He does not pass them by. I proclaim verses from Romans 8: “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship, or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword... or floods? No, for I am convinced that nothing will be able to separate us from the love of God.”

People listen intently to the message and are wanting more.

The mood in the camp is changing. There is hope, peace and joy. Revival has come! Praise be to God!

The 287 families are called one by one to receive food. All is done with order and without any fighting. As well as 50 kilograms of maize flour which should sustain a family for a month, each family receives a portion of beans, soap, salt and some clothing. The children who are naked receive theirs first. Those children in rags also take priority and receive new clothes. The patient wait for hope lasts several hours, after which we continue down the road to the next camp.

David Morrison lifted the spirits of these battle-weary refugees by reminding them that nothing -- certainly not a flood -- can separate them from the love of God. That same chapter of scripture, Romans 8, also includes the encouragement that "we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him." That may be hollow comfort for the people of Mutarara district right now, but its truth can be observed seven years after similar life-endangering flooding struck southern Mozambique.

The community of Khongolote has been a central point of our ministry here. It was there that Laura and I helped to lay bricks of a church building in 2004. It was also there that we held a micro-enterprise training course last fall. And it is there where Mario and Samuel will begin implementing the village-based savings and loan program.

That community would not have existed but for severe flooding seven years ago that washed away homes in other communities. Africans are resilient people. They are survivors. The sun will come out, the floods will recede, and the seeds of new life will germinate and sprout up amongst the muck of this tragedy.

The Trains Run on (Africa) Time

The official tourism visitor's guide issued by the Cape Town government describes Africa time best. Its section labeled "local lingo" includes the following notation:

Just now: If a South African tells you that they will do something "just now," they mean they will do it in the near future but not immediately and possibly not ever!

In Africa, "just now" means "possibly not ever." Whenever I hear those words -- just now -- I can ignore the entire statement because it provides me no information at all. For example, what did Simo, our host in Cape Town, mean when he said that he'd get the keys just now for the garage door so we could lock up our little rental car?

As it turns out, he meant within half an hour, which surpassed my low expectations.

"Africa time" is such a widespread and well-practiced concept that, although the battery in my watch died six weeks ago, I haven't been bothered enough to replace it yet. I guess I'll replace it just now. (Of course, that's not to say that I have completely adopted Africa time yet. I still get stressed when we're running late -- just ask Laura!)

Our empregada is here cleaning our house as I write, and provides another great example of Africa time. She was supposed to come yesterday, like she comes every Wednesday. Without even a phone call she didn't show up, and without a phone call she appeared at our doorstep this morning. Alzira explained to me that, by the time she realized yesterday that it was her day to come, it was mid-afternoon.

This has happened several times before: imagine our surprise the first week that she missed work, when a 7:00am doorbell interrupted our sleep the following Saturday. There stood Alzira, ready to clean. No problem, not for her, anyway. And no acknowledgment that it was anything other than Wednesday.

I'm often sitting around wondering if she is going to show up just now.

* * * * *

I don't mean to leave an impression that Africans are lazy, or that they intentionally disregard time. Sometimes the deck is stacked against them. Sometimes the poor don't have the luxury of being on time.

I had a meeting scheduled recently with one such young man, and he was decidedly late. Once the meeting had concluded, he apologized for his tardiness and proceeded to explain to me what had happened.

He works for a restaurant, and his shift ended at 11:00pm the night before. He then usually takes a local minibus (or "chapa") home, but it was raining. Mozambicans don't like to work in the rain, and the privately-operated minibuses are no exception. Once he realized that he wasn't going to succeed in getting a ride, he started the hour-and-a-half walk home, arriving home after 1:00am, soaked and exhausted. He overslept, but not enough to make him late for the meeting. What actually made him late was that he needed a clean shirt.

He only has two, or maybe three, shirts, so his choices are to wash frequently or wear them dirty. Africans, just like the rest of us, would rather not do the latter. The rain-soaked, dirty shirt from the day before needed to be cleaned.

But laundry isn't a matter of throwing a shirt in the machine to gyrate on automatic while a quick breakfast muffin warms in the microwave. Not without electricity and running water. He first had to fetch water, and then had to wash his shirt by hand, and hang it to dry. And hope that the sun is kind enough to dry it quickly.

And when all that was finally done, he had to walk over to the nearest paved street and hope that he was lucky enough to find a minibus that is running in the direction of our meeting (which he was), or start walking.

* * * * *

Good rules-of-thumb for working in Africa are to be sure not to schedule meetings after meetings -- doing so rarely works -- and have a little mercy for those who arrive late, too. Sometimes the trains are running on Africa time.

Caught in the Middle

Mario and Samuel had their first encounter with the orange-eating group of oppositionist church leaders. That the leaders agreed to allow them to come to the meeting at all was a small victory, considering that they have been rebuffing me since the fall. I'll accept that as a tiny morsel of evidence that our nationals-first strategy of implementing this program is working: with Mario and Samuel in the lead, we were finally granted another hearing.

Of course, that we were granted another hearing is not to say that the leaders were completely ready to accept our ideas. The leaders provided our two new program coordinators with the same impassioned drubbing that they had given me.

Mario expressed afterwards that, despite our warnings, he was unprepared for their combativeness.

Samuel, who had been part of that very leadership team before accepting the current assignment, knew what he was up against but was still disheartened by their reaction. He understood the drive behind their bordering-on-belligerent behaviour, but now sees it as plain old selfishness.

They were, in a sense, caught between us, their employers, and them, their compatriots.

Mario and Samuel shared with the leaders the village-based savings and loan program that we learned about on our trip to Nampula. They explained that they see this program as a foundation that will serve to build up the financial capital necessary to successfully implement other programs: micro-enterprise training, chicken farm franchises, and more.

The unhappy leaders recycled their old complains: they don't want to save their own money, and they don't want loans. They want us to give them money with as few strings attached as possible. Preferably none, please.

But they would like to participate in the first group. I guess that's a sort of back-handed endorsement that they see merit in the idea, even if it's not their first choice.

Perhaps the best news of the day came afterwards, when Mario and Samuel expressed that they remain convinced that what they witnessed in Nampula would be positively received by communities here in Maputo, and are determined to march forward.

They have identified an ally among the group of leaders, and are intent on implementing a pilot project in his community sometime in the first half of April. The clock is ticking...

(Third-Culture) Kids Will Be Kids

Laura and I chaperoned this year's high school trip: a busload of kids freed for a weekend from the thumb of their parents and the anonymity of their school uniforms.

There were many fun activities planned, like game viewing in Kruger Park, horseback riding, mountain biking, and cave exploring. The kids seemed to enjoy most sitting on the bus and chatting with their friends.

One boy complained that the leopard that we stopped for (a less-than-guaranteed spotting) was too far away. "They should put these things in cages so we can see them better," he suggested. Sure. And maybe taxidermied, too, so they wouldn't move so much.

Most interesting for me was hanging around the so-called "third culture kids": children who have a passport and citizenship in one country, but have spent the formative years of childhood living in another. Most often, these children feel like strangers in both cultures, and have more in common with one another than members of either their natural or adopted cultures.

Domingos, though ethnically Shangaan and born in Mozambique, grew up in inner-city America. He has been back in Mozambique for less than half a year, and clearly struggles to find his identity.

He is the only Mozambican I've seen to be flashing a grill and other assorted bling more commonly found hanging off of America's inner-city youth. He didn't want to blend in amongst his ethnic brothers and sisters. He wanted to be unique.

I suspect, in fact, that he adopted a stronger sense of this American-based urban hip-hop culture after leaving the United States than when he was living there. This is the life of a third culture kid: while building elements of various cultures into their stories, they often have difficulty developing a sense of ownership or belonging in any of these cultures.

The struggle to establish identity is a significant enough challenge for most teenagers, even when they have a clear sense of home.

* * * * *

The trip had plenty of adventure and misadventure both.

Each night, boys woke up to find themselves covered in toothpaste. Zach even kept his toothpaste-soiled clothes on for the remainder of the day as a badge of honour. Laura, by contrast, reports that the girls quietly braided each other's hair and then went to sleep.

Oko, a gangling teenaged acrobat, shattered a pane of glass and bloodied his knee trying to climb out of a window. He wanted to use the window because everybody else was doing it.

Another boy, Orlando, inexperienced at mountain biking but wanting to fit in with his faster peers, fell over the handlebars of his bicycle and careened across a gravel road. A dozen stitches and a lot of pain later, he was an unenvied class hero.

First culture or third, kids are still kids.

Blessed Are The Poor

I have for months had a question tucked away in my back pocket, waiting for the right opportunity to pull it out. Asking it bore an element of risk, I thought, because it might convey a lack of understanding or sensitivity. After all, isn't the answer obvious?

While in Nampula, I took the opportunity to pull the question out and lay it on someone who makes less in a month than I have ever made in a day since graduating from university: do you consider yourself to be poor?

"No, I am not poor. Of course, I am not rich either. To be rich would be to not have to worry about where my next meal was going to come from."

Never having had to worry about where my next meal was going to come from, I realized that poverty is definitely relative. Who in Canada, having made less than $1,000 in the previous year as the head of a household, would not consider him or herself to be poor? As he continued speaking, I became more and more intrigued by his reflections.

"I was rich once, you know."

He went on to describe for me that he used to live as the personal assistant for a wealthy foreigner here in Maputo. He earned a salary of slightly under $150 per month, but was also given accommodation and access to his patron's refrigerator. He had a life free of worry. A life of wealth.

"And being rich," he had come to realize, "is boring."

"I remember once when I didn't cook for an entire week," he explained to me. "I just ate these soups that my patron had in the cupboard, the kind where I just had to pour in boiling water, and had ham sandwiches grilled in a sandwich maker."

(I thought quietly to myself at that moment about all the times that Laura and I have picked up the telephone and ordered in food because we were just too tired, or couldn't be bothered, to cook something as simple as a grilled sandwich -- because that would be too much work.)

"But I was often lonely, just looking after his house while he was away on business."

For this one Mozambican, life's objective is not riches. It is being in positive, meaningful relationship with neighbours. It is being able to live up to his God-given potential which, he learned, is not sitting around babysitting a house that sheltered him from worry. A little bit of worry, he seemed to be suggesting, is the adventure that adds spice to life. The spice that keeps us relying on God rather than ourselves.

And in that moment I was more sure of this one fact than I have ever been in my life: that the objective of my international compassion ministry should be to equip people so that they are able to live up to their God-given potential, not simply to provide food for the hungry.

The poor are not those who cannot afford a Jaguar, or even a jalopy. The poor are those, with or without their jalopy, who are barred from realizing the potential that God has created within them.

There's Room in the Inn -- But That's All!

In preparation for our trip to Nampula, I knew that we would have difficulty balancing my first-world expectations with Mario and Samuel's African standards. Any hotel that we selected, I thought, is likely to be below my standards and above theirs.

Despite some trepidation over the conditions that I would face, I wanted Samuel and Mario to be responsible for making decisions, including where we would stay.

Our first night was spent in a small community called Ribaue. We stayed in the only accommodation that we could find, which cost us $4 each. My anxiety lightened as I heard the responses to questions that Mario and Samuel asked: "Yes, the hotel has private washrooms," was the reply to their first question.

Of course, my anxiety wasn't in retreat for long. I soon learned that this is not the same as having a washroom in my room: what they really meant to say was yes, our communal washrooms have doors on them. And I soon learned that those doors latched closed by the strength of a bent nail hammered into the door frame.

"Does the hotel have water?" Mario asked next.

"Yes," was the simple response, which (foolishly) was enough for me. The hotel has water! (Wait a second. Is it usual to ask if a hotel has water?) What I didn't yet realize was that "having water" and "having running water" are two completely different standards, neither one of which I would even think to ask. Asking about the availability of potable water -- now that's something I would think to ask in rural Africa, but of this there was little room for doubt. There would be no potable water and there was no running water. The flimsy-doored washrooms down the hall were equipped with a bucket filled with the cold water of an open, hand-dug well out back, qualifying its proprietors to indicate that, yes, they have water.

I was starting to get the picture that luxury this was not when having sheets on the bed was the next feature described to us.

And that the mosquito net hanging above my bed would be a suitable deterrent, unless, of course, the mosquitoes were clever enough to find any of the dozen or so gaping tears in its side. (Mosquitoes in Mozambique, as it turns out, are rather clever.)

Despite the shock of being plunged into rural Africa, I slept mighty well that night after a long day of travel.

* * * * *

The hotel we stayed at for the last two nights of our Nampula adventure was closer to my standards (though the fact that we had a room at all was enough after our night of the cramped, sweltering faux-luxury of our pickup truck). At $20 a night, it was a little steep for Mario and Samuel, but they had difficulty finding other options.

This hotel, they grinned majestically as they told me, had cable television and running water! Heated running water, we later learned, which made my colleagues feel like they had hit upon the big time.

The only thing that it was missing was a reliable supply of electricity. We were in the comfort of heaven. What, after all, do we need lights for when we're trying to sleep?